Prof. Ahote could tell the Anasazi hadn’t been wiped out by plague, as a theory put forward during the last influenza epidemic claimed. Or destroyed in war, as claimed theories developed during the American-Soviet Cold War. And he guarded against making the same mistake: explaining the past with stories that said more about present fears than what had actually happened. Today’s Fads: The Norse cut down their trees till there were no more trees, and so no more boats, and so no more Norsemen. Easter Islanders destroyed their islands, and so their society, by going to war with nature; as did the Olmecs… Seemed like a year didn’t go by without the collapse of another ancient civilization being attributed to its citizens maxing out their resources. The price of wood skyrocketed in Manhattan in the 1800s because forests for 300 miles all around had been clear-cut….
Still, just because two times or places rhymed didn’t mean the poem was a fiction, and as he brushed surface dirt away from the adobe doorway, the evidence that Anasazi society collapsed because it had become too complex seemed clear. He got out his pocket loupe and examined the doorway’s threshold. There they were again, just as he had found in the doorway of four other cliff dwellings: smooth marks left by human hands, the kind one would see in the wet clay on a potter’s wheel, evidence that wet clay had been used to seal the door shut. And if that were true, whoever lived in this cliff dwelling abandoned it deliberately. And with enough time to do so carefully. And, it would seem, with the intention to return.
As Prof. Ahote focused a camera on the smooth clay, his mind pieced together a scene as to how it played out: an Anasazi father—let’s call him Yani—who had lived in this cliff dwelling some 500 years ago smoothing wet clay to seal up its doors and windows, remembering how when he was a child, his father had tried to hunt deer during a drought. He’d done so because his father before him had said that was how the Anasazi used to make it through droughts—just walk out of the pueblo and find deer there.
Prof. Ahote knew that the Anasazi had lived by hunting deer during periods of drought, even if Yani hadn’t, because the professor had been able to match rainfall patterns written in the growth rings of fossilized trees with the ages of charred deer bones excavated from fire pits. From the other data he collected, he also knew, even if Yani didn’t, that there were too few deer even in Yani’s father’s time, and none at all by the time the Anasazi abandoned their city. A city that had been ever growing. More people. Always more people, then suddenly less water….
When people were few and deer plentiful, an inefficient society with scarce resources wasn’t a problem: the men could simply go out into the wilderness and hunt in times of need. Or eat the fruit of wild cacti. And always times of want could be weathered as a boat rides over a wave. But then as the people became many, their lives began to entangle, each family weaving its strands with all other families till their society was as knotted as a net with each knot depending on strands from all the others—zero degrees of separation—turkeys depending on corn harvests which depended on ash to nourish the soil and hoes to spread it, the hoes dependent on the straight adder trees and tool workers and all the others who now depended on turkeys—if one knot in a net fails, the entire net becomes worthless, catastrophe for all. No longer could the men simply find food outside the bounds of the pueblo. No more could they simply walk to the next spring, for there was now another tribe there. Their world became a game of knucklebones with the change of climate and increase of people and decrease in deer and cacti being the players that positioned their bones to narrow their options. The rows upon rows of maize that they had depended upon withered. The turkeys did not multiply for lack of maize. And without the turkeys, children grew crooked. The old died before their time. The people grew desperate. They listened to the hotheaded young men and their new god who deemed today as the day they would all walk away. Abandon their cliff dwellings. Abandon the navel of the world. They would walk out into the world, where fields of grass were as vast as the sky, and roamed by beasts so large that just one could make a feast.
The fall of Athens, the fall of Rome, the fall of Mesopotamia, the fall of Constantinople, of Easter Island, the Mayans, Norse Society, and all those other civilizations that had collapsed because they grew larger than their fields. Once they began to eat their seed corn, it was over. And every time, the last Roman, the last Mayan, had moved on to start over in a place beyond the horizon. Progress, we’d called it.
Now that we were progressing on a global scale, though, the professor thought—if one knot in a net fails—and there was nowhere to go…. What would Yani do were he alive today? Build a rocket and leave Earth?—like people here kept talking about ever since The Galileo Massive Cloud Orbiting Telescope started sending back pictures of Red Marble Earth?….
The professor snorted. That fiction was worse than fantasy. It was suicide. And he wished Hollywood would make a Sci-Fi movie titled Leaving Earth Is Not an Option. He ran his fingers over the marks in the clay, the work of human hands; clay was a thing; hands were a thing; clay in hands were a third thing that made other things possible, one being the act of philosophy that the Japanese considered a person working clay to be. Seeing a meditative hand at work in the clay here, it was obvious that leaving Earth would never be an option even if it became possible.
Though the air did seem to have become like the heat of a fire, and the ground dry as dust, and the seasons fled the land, the rains always returned, Yani must have thought, as any of the elders could attest. So he calmly sealed up its window and door to keep out rodents, then climbed down the ladder of their cliff dwellings. He joined those leaving the withered fields behind, and turned to look at his abandoned home one last time, nestled among the other cliff dwellings, sure that one day he—or maybe his descendants—would be back.